Poker News: EPT Monte Carlo Win, WSOPE & Malta Poker Schedules

We finally have some details on the Malta Poker Championships as well as the 2019 World Series of Poker Europe. Before we dive into those, we’ll recap one big winner from this past week.

Kudzmanas Cashes At EPT Monte Carlo Event

Marius Kudzmanas was the big winner at the PokerStars & Monte-Carlo Casino EPT 1,100 NLHE Freezeout event, taking home $47,545 for the victory. He navigated his way through a field of 198 entries for this year’s event, which was was slightly bigger than last year’s field of 183 players. In total, 27 different players ended up cashing in while the top 5 all collected five-figure paydays. The win pushed Kudzmanas’ career winnings to over $200,000.

In the final hand of Level 26 of the tournament, Kudzmanas defeated Oscar Jonsson from Iceland in heads-up play. The Lithuanian rallied from a below average stack to turn his day around and put some serious pressure on the other players. Even though he had lost more than half of his stack at one point, Kudzmanas managed to find a way to turn his day around and win straight.

The official final table also featured Paul Testud, Jeffrey Colpitts and the popular brothers Nick and James Pupillo.

Schedule Announced For Malta Poker Championships

The details for the inaugural Malta Poker Championships have been announced and it looks like it’ll be a fun week of festivities for those involved. The events will take place at the Portomaso Casino in Malta beginning May 13th through 19th.

The founder of this tournament, Ivonne Montealegre, promised that poker fans should expect the unexpected at this event. Players will be able to enjoy a full slate of tournaments and play cash games around the clock thanks to the event partnering with the Cash Game Festival.

The highlight of the schedule is that it should be affordable to everyone with buy-ins ranging from 30 euros through 300 euros. The biggest event has a 300-euro buy-in, which is low compared to most tournaments. A lot of players feel like the final events are out of reach. Of course, the tournament guarantees are much smaller as a result with nothing above 15,000 Euros, but the hope is that the volume of players pushes it up.

That festival builds on the successful first Malta Poker Festival that took place at the same casino in November of 2018.

WSOPE Schedule Revealed

The countdown to the 11th edition of the biggest poker event in Europe is also officially on as the schedule for the 2019 World Series of Poker Europe has officially been announced.

The WSOPE will run from October 13th through November 4th at the King’s Resort in Rozvadov of the Czech Republic. This event will be immediately preceded by the WSOP Circuit Series that runs from September 26th through October 24th. That marks the third straight year that this tournament will take place at the same casino.

In total, 10 gold bracelets will be handed out from start to finish with more than 14 million Euros in cash prize money awarded. Two marquee bracelet events will contribute more than half of that guaranteed prize money and those are the WSOPE Europe no-limit hold’em Main Event and the Super High Roller.

A year ago, the WSOPE had 534 entries that created a guaranteed prize pool of more than five million Euros. With the stakes higher than ever before, this year’s WSOPE promises to be bigger and better.